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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Names: Beezley, William H., author.
Title: Latin American cultural objects and episodes / William H. Beezley.
Description: Hoboken, NJ : Wiley‐Blackwell, 2021. | Series: Viewpoints/Puntos de vista : themes and interpretations in Latin American history | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020030563 (print) | LCCN 2020030564 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119078265 (paperback) | ISBN 9781119078142 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119078074 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Material culture–Latin America. | Popular culture–Latin America. | Mass media–Social aspects–Latin America. | Latin America–Social life and customs. | Latin America–Civilization.
Classification: LCC GN562 .B44 2021 (print) | LCC GN562 (ebook) | DDC 306.098–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020030563 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020030564
Cover Design: Wiley
Cover Image: © Gabriel Perez/Getty Images
Series Editor’s Preface
Each book in the “Viewpoints/Puntos de Vista” series introduces students to a significant theme or topic in Latin American history. In an age in which student and faculty interest in the Global South increasingly challenges the old focus on the history of Europe and North America, Latin American history has assumed a prominent position in undergraduate curricula. At a time when immigration restrictions, a growing income gap, and a pandemic have combined to problematize globalization under the aegis of neoliberalism, knowledge of Latin American history is also important for the public at large.
Some of the books in this series discuss the ways in which historians have interpreted these themes and topics, thus demonstrating that our understanding of our past is constantly changing, through the emergence of new sources, methodologies, and historical theories. Others offer an introduction to a particular theme by means of a case study or biography in a manner easily understood by the contemporary, non‐specialist reader. Yet others give an overview of a major theme that might serve as the foundation of an upper‐level course.
What is common to all of these books is their goal of historical synthesis. They draw on the insights of generations of scholarship on the most enduring and fascinating issues in Latin American history, while also making use of primary sources as appropriate. Each book is written by a first‐rate scholar and specialist in Latin American history committed to bringing their expertise into the undergraduate classroom and to a public audience.
The books in this series can be used in a variety of ways, recognizing the differences in teaching conditions at small liberal arts colleges, large public universities, and research‐oriented institutions with doctoral programs. Faculty have particular needs depending on whether they teach large lectures with discussion sections, small lecture or discussion‐oriented classes, or large lectures with no discussion sections, and whether they teach on a semester or trimester system. The format adopted for this series fits all of these different parameters, as well as the needs of a general public interested in learning more about Latin American history without prior academic preparation.
This volume celebrates a milestone as the tenth book in the “Viewpoints/Puntos de Vista” series, and the first edited and published with the assistance of Jennifer Manias, Wiley’s Acquisitions Editor in History. In Latin American Cultural Objects and Episodes, William H. Beezley provides a compelling and fascinating analysis of Latin America’s rich cultural history, using as its point of departure the history of objects. Drawing on historical literature and primary sources from Latin America, Europe, and the United States, the author takes the reader on a historical tour de force that uses a vast array of objects, from coffee beans to bowler hats, cartoons, and roasted chicken, as gateways to understanding major themes in cultural history, and most importantly, the complex art of survival and resistance in a world region buffeted by conquest, colonialism, exploitation, imperialism, and social inequality. Written by one of the pioneers in Latin American cultural history whose 1987 book, Judas at the Jockey Club and Other Episodes of Porfirian Mexico, helped spark intense interest in this field, the book also brings objects to life as mementos to everyday life and material culture – aspects of history that a more traditional or textual analysis illuminates only with great difficulty. I am most pleased to present this important work to what I hope will be a wide readership.
Jürgen Buchenau
University of North Carolina
Charlotte, USA
Call…cry…shout…yell “Ooo‐wa‐ooo‐aaooaaooaa‐ooo!” or “Taaar‐maan‐ganiii”
The call to action, the cry for attention, the shout for followers, or the yell for adventure – the expression of much of Latin America’s history comes through these declarations of political battles, alerts to domestic or foreign dangers, rallies of like‐minded individuals, and introductions of the first step to challenges. These outcries also signal identification of real and imagined communities, built through the appropriation of cultural items in Latin America and the mass media creation of cosmopolitan popular culture. Calls, or gritos, serve a major role in Latin American, for example Mexican, politics and culture. The best known surely is Padre Miguel Hidalgo’s “Grito de Dolores” that in 1810 launched the struggle for Mexican independence. The Catholic rebellion beginning in 1927 against the Mexican revolution leaders featured the iconic cry, “¡Viva Cristo Rey!” Moreover, groups and institutions adopt yells that identify those who shout, such as the National Autonomous University of Mexico students who chant approval, “¡Goya!, ¡Goya!” Searching out these cries for different organizations and different Latin American countries provides an intriguing scavenger hunt that reveals a different dimension of both global and national cultures.
No shout, sounding across Latin America and most of the rest of the globe’s comic strip pages, radio airwaves, and movie soundtracks, has ever equaled Tarzan’s signature roar. When Edgar Rice Burroughs created his fictional hero slightly over a century ago, he described the shout as “the victory cry of the bull ape.” Whatever it sounded like, it called together a global following for the syndicated comic strip that by 1935 appeared in 278 newspapers worldwide. When Tarzan appeared in movies and on radio, fans heard it for the first time. The initial version premiered in the partial sound movie serial Tarzan the Tiger (1929) as a “Nee‐Yah!” noise and then on the first radio serial
